This past month James had worked with Citrix Sales Engineer Shaun to gear training towards ramping up the Citrix and Ethernet teams on the Netscaler product.  This collaboration was designed to better prepare Shaun for training a team such as the distribution team at Ingram Micro.  The end desired result was a team that would be better prepared to sell more Citrix Netscalers through Ingram Micro.

During August James conducted a follow-up training with his Citrix team.  The goal is to update the weaknesses and remaining questions that the Citrix team to better sell Citrix Netscaler through Ingram Micro.

Over the last Month James had met with his Citrix team to do a general crack and gap.  These are mini-trainings designed to address the specific weaknesses within each member.  With these trainings our team members are better prepared to address Citrix calls and therefore better enabled to sell more Citrix through Ingram Micro.

This past month James had several con-calls with his Market Development team, our VARs and their end users.  These calls were made on a one-off basis for the more advanced Citrix solutions that needed specific and immediate attention.  Due to being engaged in these calls James had helped the customer better understand the proper Citrix solution, resulting in an increased probability of sale in Citrix products through Ingram Micro.
	
Ingram Micro technician Robert mentioned how security is becoming a larger issue within customers’ concerns.  Given how smart phones such as iphones are on the rise, he suggested a simple app that Citrix could add to add a second factor of authentication to their Access Gateway environment.  With the addition of the app on the iphone a user could have a second login and provide two-factor authentication at a minimal increase in overhead cost for Citrix.  This would likely to increase sales of Citrix Access Gateways through Ingram Micro.

Ingram Micro technician James commented on how Citrix’s new VDI-in-a-Box solution has a high cost to add a separate application virtualization solution for more than 75 users.  Since we can only do application virtualization with VDI-in-a-Box we often need to add a second component such as Xenapp Fundamentals for an expected price increase.  The issue arises when you hit the 75 user cap of Fundamentals.  To add Xenapp for more than 75 uses for the most economical price would require an end user to purchase Xendesktop Enterprise edition.  This partially negates the benefits of getting VDI-in-a-Box due to Xendesktop being an alternative solution.  Furthermore, the cost does not make sense for a small to medium-sized business.  I would recommend selling Xenapp at a reduced cost to those that purchase VDI-in-a-Box.  This would help increase the sales of VDI-in-a-Box for both Citrix and Ingram Micro.

Ingram Micro technician James had noticed on how the price of Xendesktop VDI Edition is much less expensive than VDI-in-a-Box.  Considering that this product is around half of the price per user in comparison to VDI-in-a-Box puts VDI-in-a-Box in a less-than-optimal position for selling to the SMB that is familiar with the complexities in setting up Xendesktop.  Granted, VDI-in-a-Box is quicker and easier to set up, but at half of the cost customers may still consider going with VDI Edition of Xendesktop.  Citrix needs to reduce the cost of VDI-in-a-Box or increase the cost of VDI Edition to make VDI-in-a-Box more competitive.
